2. In the morning Byron came in a motor launch down a crowded market canal with the stranger, the man from the mainland. The stranger’s name was Raymond Keller.
Teresa had agreed to accept a third person on their journey. She had, however, retained veto power over Byron’s choice. It seemed now like a wise decision. Looking at Raymond Keller, she was not certain she wanted to spend much time with him.
She led both men up to the narrow balcony that surrounded her studio, to the wicker chairs there. Byron made introductions; she brought out iced bottles of Mexican beer; the three of them sat. Strange mixture, she thought. Byron, of course, looked displaced in almost any rational setting. He cultivated the look: outlaw ’lith chemist, wild veteran of the Brazilian War, scarred and tattooed and inscrutable behind his moon-shaped lenses.
This new man (Byron had said) was also a veteran. He wore an old flak jacket, carried a battered duffel—he looked the role. Perhaps too much so. She distrusted the opacity of his pale blue eyes, the way he scrutinized her when he thought she wasn’t looking. She had seen too many of these people in the galleries, urban operators with an eye to the main chance. They came out of the dry conduit suburbs of the Valley as if from an assembly line, slick and soulless.
They talked in general terms about the war. Byron had been Keller’s platoon Angel, he said, and then Keller had become an Angel himself. Unlike Byron, Keller had kept his wires. Keller worked for the Network and would be recording the journey in its entirety.
Byron had explained some of this before. “You understand,” he’d said, “Ray does his own editing. Mostly he wants the footage of Pau Seco. If we appear at all in the material he hands over to the Network, names and faces are systematically altered. There’s no threat to us.”
“I don’t understand,” she had said, “why we need him.”
“Because he’s been there,” Byron said. “Because he knows the territory. Because—up to a point—I trust him.”
“You think Wexler is lying?”
“I think he’s fallible,” Byron had replied. And now this man, this Angel, wired, was sitting and regarding her with his distant blue eyes. It was strange to think about.
She excused herself and brought out a sketchpad and a carbon pencil from her studio. She gave them to Keller. “Ray,” she said, “would you do me a favor?”
He hesitated, nodded.
“Draw me a picture,” she said. “While we talk. Will you do that?”
“I’m not an artist.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
He frowned at the blank page of the sketchpad. “Picture of what?”
“Yourself.”
He gave her a long look but nodded yes. She said, “I guess Byron’s told you what we have planned.”
“The basics. We all go down into the interior. We bring back a new stone.”
She nodded. “It’s more complicated, of course. Cruz Wexler i financing the trip. You know Wexler?”
“He runs some kind of institute up in Carmel.”
Byron said, “He’s been putting money into the ’lith underground for a long time. The news now is that there’s a new kind of ’lith coming out of the Pau Seco mine. The theory is that the Pau Seco astrobleme was a single chunk of data-intensive memory, and that the core samples coming up now have been better preserved, less degraded over the centuries… Wexler’s been trying to buy one through the standard black market—out the back door of the government labs—but the lid is on very tight. So he arranged the Pau Seco purchase direct from source. We are his couriers.”
“Paid,” Keller said.
“In my case,” Byron said. “I stand to make money. Professionally speaking.”
Teresa said, “I volunteered.”
He turned his eyes on her. “It matters that much to you?”
She watched Keller’s pencil move absently over the sketch paper. She nodded. “Yes. It does.”
“Byron says you’re a dreamstone addict.”
“Addict is maybe the wrong word. For most people, you know, it’s not a very satisfying drug.”
“It makes visions,” Keller said. “It does more than that. You ever try it, Ray?” He shook his head no.
She said, “It’s powerful. Direct interaction with the mind. It’s not a chemical, there’s no chemical effect. The lab people can’t explain it. But you touch a stone… worlds open for you. Can you understand that?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Maybe.”
At least it was an honest answer. She had met plenty of ’lith chemists in the Floats and plenty of dealers, and their attitude toward the Exotic stones was too often purely exploitative. For them it was a drug, an item of contraband, a more esoteric variation on the Schedule One neuropeptides that had proven so popular in the coastal cities. That was the odd thing about the stones, she thought: something different for everyone. For the laboratory technicians they were data-intensive Rosetta Stones from the ancient stars, decodable and immensely profitable; for the chemists and their urban customers they were a new drug, a visionary diversion…
And for me?
Well. A road, she thought. A destination.
She wondered if Raymond Keller was capable of understanding that.
She said, “I can’t see making this trip with somebody I don’t trust. Byron says you’re a good guy, Ray. But I can’t know that. Right? I can only guess. Intuition is all I have right now, you understand?”
He nodded.
She said, “So show me your picture.”
He looked down at it as if it had slipped his mind. Picture? But his hands had been busily at work. That was what she wanted.
She took the sketchpad and held it in her lap. Surprisingly, the drawing displayed a certain amount of talent. It was a head-and-shoulders portrait, ragged but complete. It was also, she thought, immensely revealing. Keller had done the outline in hard angular strokes; the eyebrows were single slashes, the mouth an emotionless compaction of pencil carbon. Soulless, she thought. But the eyes redeemed him. Around the eyes Keller’s pencil lines had softened; the pupils were deep and dimensional, the expression pained.
She thought, He is not what he believes himself to be. Hard, oh yes. But she looked at the eyes and thought, Redeemable.
It was enough.
“We leave in a couple of days,” she said.
CHAPTER 3
The oneiroliths, the Exotic stones, had shaped Keller’s past and created his history. What he had told Teresa was more or less true—he had never held one in his hand for more than a moment. But he dreamed of them persistently.
His dreams were jungle panoramas, condensed video scenarios in which he, Keller, was simultaneously narrator and protagonist. In some he was that anonymous forao who had stumbled out of the Brazilian hinterland clutching a strange gemstone, afraid of the visions it produced but anxious to sell it, frustrated when he could not, fearful when the stone was at last impounded by the Valverde government. In the dream he was tortured by FUNAI officials (though there was no real evidence of this) who demanded to know the precise location of the discovery. A nation, they explained, cannot be sustained indefinitely by gold and bauxite. Tell us, they said calmly, and plied him with electrodes.
Dissolve to aerial shot. The Amazon: jungle, farms, ranches, dams, wilderness mostly—the languid snake of the eponymous river brown and sunlit in it. He dreamed history in sepia tones: four times the Amazon Basin had repulsed the invasion of civilized men. It cast out, chastened and scythed by dysentery, the Portuguese bandeirantes who came in search of El Dorado. It allowed the Jesuits only a little more grace before it reclaimed their missions, lost to crumbling government support and the unassailable hugeness of the wilderness. Briefly, there had been the rubber boom, the jungle had been invaded for its latex groves— but the Malaysians grew better trees on more accessible plantations. And in the closing years of the twentieth century there had been a more prolonged effort to settle the interior: highways had been built, villages founded, oil wells and mines created; all fueled, however, by an international debt so enormous it could not be sustained. And so these small oases had come crashing down. Villages had gone to ghost towns, vines had crept across the roads.